Business Processes Refactoring to Improve Usability in E-Commerce Applications

Abstract

Refactoring is a technique that applies step-by-step transformations intended to improve the quality of softwarewhile preserving its behavior.It represents an essential activity in today ́s software lifecycle and a powerful tool against software decay. Software decay, however, is not only about code becoming legacy, but it is also about systems becoming less usablecompared to competitor solutions adoptingnewdesignsand newtechnologies. If we narrow the focus on e-commerce systems, the role of usability becomes essential: higher usability is in fact a requirement to win the market competition and to retain customers from turning to other choices. One reason why ane-commerceapplicationcan start suffering frompoorusabilityis because of itsbusiness processes becoming difficult to access, complicatedto execute, and, overall, offering a poor user experience. In this paper we arguethat refactoring can beakey solutionforthis kind of usabilityissues. In particular, we propose a catalog of refactorings as a means to systematically identify and address lack of usability in the business processes of an e-commerce application,and to seize opportunities for usability improvement. To make the presentation concrete and to provide evidence of the benefits that applying our refactorings can bring,wepresenta number of exampleswith reference towell-knowne-commerce websites.